The Insubric space and its institutions

A name from antiquity for a modern region

The word Insubria goes back to the Insubres, a Celtic people from Transalpine Gaul who settled from about the fifth century BC in the plain between the Ticino river and Lake Como and whose principal settlement was Mediolanum, the later Milan. As a regional name, Insubria owes its modern currency largely to the naturalists: in the eighteenth century Albrecht von Haller used it for the plant-geographical region that comprises southern Ticino, the southern Alpine valleys and the lake district of northern Italy as far east as Lake Garda.¹ It was revived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by geographers, naturalists and local writers who wanted a neutral name for the lake district shared by Lombardy, Piedmont and the Swiss canton. Since the 1990s it has acquired an administrative meaning as well, because the cross-border working community founded in 1995 adopted it as its name. In Ticino, the regional news of the public broadcaster RSI appears under the heading "Ticino, Grigioni e Insubria", which shows how far the term has entered ordinary language.²

In this chapter "Insubric region" means the area that comprises the Canton of Ticino, the Italian provinces of Como, Varese and Verbano-Cusio-Ossola, and, in a wider sense, the provinces of Lecco and Novara and the metropolitan city of Milan. The definition is functional. It follows the daily movement of workers, consumers and goods and the reach of the regional railway network more closely than any historical boundary. Its core is the band of territory within about twenty kilometres of the border, which is also the zone that the tax agreement of 2020 uses to define a crossborder worker. Its outer ring is the metropolitan area of Milan, whose airports, universities, exchanges and corporate headquarters set the economic horizon of the whole region.

The border that runs through this space is old and, by European standards, unusually stable. It separated the Confederate bailiwicks from the Duchy of Milan from the early sixteenth century, survived the Napoleonic period with only minor changes and became the border between the Swiss Confederation and the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Its stability has made it a line of permanent legal difference. On one side lie Swiss federal law, the Swiss franc, cantonal taxation and the Swiss social insurances. On the other lie Italian law, the euro since 1999 and 2002, the Italian tax system and the Italian national health service. The economic history of the region, from smuggling in the nineteenth century to the banking boom of the post-war decades described in Chapter D.II, is to a large extent the history of the use made of these differences.

Notes

1. Enciclopedia Treccani, art. "Insubri", https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/insubri/ (Celtic people from Transalpine Gaul, settled between the Ticino and Lake Como from about the fifth century BC, principal centre Mediolanum; use of the name Insubria in plant geography by A. von Haller in the eighteenth century). ↩
2. The heading is used throughout the regional news section of RSI, e.g. https://www.rsi.ch/info/ticino-grigioni-e-insubria/Prima-i-nostri-ci-siamo--1051545.html. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.